Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
David Price hates when it rains. "It's just anxiety and stress," said the Orléans man, who for the past eight years has seen his Harvest Crescent backyard fill up with water whenever there's a downpour. The issue has to do with a city-owned culvert behind Price's home that he says is spilling water into his yard. When he bought the house in 2014, it wasn't a huge problem — but Price said it's been getting worse each year since then.
A tap in the basement of Winnipeg City Hall has been deliberately left running for nearly as long as the COVID-19 pandemic has lasted in Manitoba. Coun. Shawn Nason (Transcona) raised the issue of the flowing faucet at Thursday's council meeting, saying it has poured the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools down the drain. "If a 50-year-old building requires taps to be on 24 hours a day, we have some serious issues," Nason told reporters after the city council meeting.
One in five Winnipeg homeowners with lead pipes will get unacceptable levels of lead in their drinking water the moment they turn on the tap, according to the City of Winnipeg. Under the city's lead water quality testing program, samples were taken from 268 homes with lead pipes between Aug. 15 and Nov. 19. The testing was done to ensure water quality met new national guidelines for lead in drinking water, which cut the acceptable amount of contamination in half last March. "Overall, the results are as expected," Renee Grosselle, manager of environmental standards with the City of Winnipeg, told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
